“The poverty on this side Ireland makes me sick at the stomach. Such a God-and-man-abandoned collection of disease and misery I never believed possible. Death and disease seem clutching their victims away in your very sight, and you see them struggle and go through their last agony in the streets--unpitied. How people can ride in carriages and wear white gloves and smile and look happy, in this great lazar-house, is beyond my conception. I keep my great cloak pocket full of pence, and shut my eyes while I give them into their skinny hands,--poor devils!” Madden sings the wrath of Campbell over this literary undertaking of Willis: “What could he know of Ireland? How could any American know anything about it? Fourteen days! All the knowledge he possesses of Ireland might have been acquired in fourteen hours.” Willis might have retorted by asking what a Scotchman could know about the Valley of Wyoming. Or he might have pointed out that, even as early as 1839, Americans had fuller sources of information about Ireland than they found altogether comfortable. After three weeks more of touring in that ragged commonwealth, he returned with his wife to England. Bolney was but twelve miles from Brighton, where the Wallacks were staying, and while visiting at the former place Willis had run across country and taken dinner with them. In November he spent a few days at Brighton, where he lodged at the Ship Hotel, found several old acquaintances,--Lady Stepney and Lady Georgiana Fane among them,--and made some new ones. At a dinner at Lady Macdonald’s he met Charles Kemble, the actor, and Horace Smith, of the “Rejected Addresses,” whose brother James he had known at Lady Blessington’s four years ago. One of Willis’s cherished plans had been to spend the winter in Spain, a country rich in matter for future pencillings, but this scheme he had to forego, Ireland proving a longer job than he had anticipated. The last day of 1839 found him still at Charlton, working four hours a day on the book, and in January and February he had to make another trip to Ireland, visiting the Giant’s Causeway and other celebrated bits of scenery in the north. Lady Georgiana Fane had procured him a letter from her father, the old Earl of Westmoreland, to Lord Ebrington, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, in which Willis was described as “a gentleman of fortune, likely to attain to the presidency”! He dined with Lord Ebrington at Dublin, and, happening to be there at the time of the ball given in honor of the queen’s wedding, he made a letter of it for the “Corsair,” afterwards included in “Sketches of Travel.”